The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable

By Marc C. Conner

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels have almost exclusively been examined as sagas illuminating history, race, culture, and gender politics. This gathering of eight essays by top scholars probes Morrison's novels and her growing body of nonfiction and critical work for the complex and potent aesthetic elements that have made her a major American novelist of the twentieth century.

Through traditional aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, the beautiful, and the grotesque, through issues of form, narrative, and language, and through questions of affect and reader response, the nine essays in this volume bring into relief the dynamic and often overlooked range within Morrison's writing. Employing aesthetic ideas that range from the ancient Greeks to contemporary research in the black English oral tradition, The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison shows the potency of these ideas for interpreting Morrison's writing. This is a force Morrison herself has often suggested in her claims that Greek tragedy bears a striking similarity to “Afro-American communal structures.”

At the same time each essay attends to the ways in which Morrison also challenges traditional aesthetic concepts, establishing the African American and female voices that are essential to her sensibility. The result is a series of readings that simultaneously expands our understanding of Morrison's work and also provokes new thinking about an aesthetic tradition that is nearly 2,500 years old.

These essays offer a rich complement to the dominant approaches in Morrison scholarship by revealing aspects of her work that purely ideological approaches have obscured or about which they have remained oddly silent. Each essay focuses particularly on the relations between the aesthetic and the ethical in Morrison's writing and between the artistic production and its role in the world at large. These relations show the rich political implications that aesthetic analysis engenders.

By treating both Morrison's fiction and her nonfiction, the essays reveal a mind and imagination that have long been intimately engaged with the questions and traditions of the aesthetic domain. The result is a provocative and original contribution to Morrison scholarship, and to scholarship in American letters generally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jan 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9781496800862

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Aesthetics and the African American Novel

Marc C. Conner

For who shall describe beauty? What is it?

W. E. B. Du Bois, Criteria of Negro Art, 1926

There is something irresistibly displaced and marginal about the now common and limiting phrase ‘aesthetic considerations.’

Raymond Williams, Keywords, 1976

The discussion of black literature in critical terms is unfailingly sociology and almost never art criticism.

Toni Morrison, Memory, Creation, Writing, 1984

In The World and the Jug, Ralph Ellison’s powerful meditation upon the roles of aesthetics and politics in the African-American novel, Ellison makes a key distinction: The novel, he urges, "is always a public gesture, though not necessarily a political one. Few American authors have been more aware than Ellison of the unyielding connections between the work of art and life as it is lived, that is, between the aesthetic and the political realms. Indeed, Ellison insists that the African-American writer must engage the original American ideals of social and political justice." Yet Ellison’s distinction suggests that the novel, while necessarily political, is not only political, and those who view the novel as only a political tool reduce it to something quite other than a work of art. Such critics, Ellison asserts, should abandon literature for politics (Ellison, 110, 112).

Toni Morrison emerged as a major novelist in the wake of the 1960s, a decade fraught with contested ideas of the relations between the work of art and the political arena. For Morrison, the claim that art is somehow divorced from the political realm—what she has called the art/politics fake debate (Preface ix)—is absurd; like Ellison, she is committed to an art that is both aesthetically powerful and politically effective: for me, she states, a novel has to be socially responsible as well as very beautiful (Jones and Vinson 183). Such a position demands a criticism that is cognizant of the political power of Morrison’s writing, and also emphasizes the multiple elements of her work that belong to the domain of art. Yet despite the impressive growth in Morrison scholarship in recent years—no living American author has commanded more attention and critical production in the last two decades—there is an absence in Morrison scholarship, a silence that threatens to limit her writing and its reception. Critics consistently view her novels primarily through a political or ideological lens, thereby obscuring the specifically aesthetic elements of her work.¹ To employ Morrison’s own words, quoted above, the scholarship risks partaking too much of sociology, not enough of art criticism.

But as the opening epigrams suggest, the aesthetic constitutes a contested and often ill-defined series of discourses. Recent scholarship has gone far in dismissing the myth of an isolated, apolitical aesthetic realm—what Terry Eagleton terms the disabling idea of aesthetic autonomy (9; see also Jay, The Aesthetic Ideology’ 71–83). Yet the contrary impulse, to see the aesthetic as only a reflection or expression of political ideology, is equally crippling, and has dominated criticism in the last three decades. As George Levine argues, the aesthetics/politics struggle has led to a reductive assimilation of literature to ideology or to a resistant sense that the literary and the political should have nothing to do with each other. Subsuming the aesthetic to the political, or making the cleavage between them absolute, simultaneously refuses to see the potentially liberating effects of art, and obscures the real fact that the specifically aesthetic realm operates differently from others and contributes in distinctive ways to the possibilities of human fulfillment and connection. Thus Levine asserts that no criticism that refuses distinctions between aesthetic and instrumental functions of language can do justice either to the aesthetic or the ideological (1, 3, 9).

Indeed, the aesthetic domain has always approached the work of art in both its internal aspects, or qualities of form, and its external aspects, or qualities of content. The category of the aesthetic, over the course of its long existence, concerns itself with two primary elements: the effect of the work of art on the perceiver, and the work of art in and of itself, without consideration of external elements. The idea of readerly affect—Aristotle’s catharsis, Horace’s delight, Longinus’s sublime, Kant’s disinterested contemplation, Gadamer’s hermenuetic circle—has long been central to aesthetic study. Similarly, the idea that the work of art demands an analysis devoted only to its internal form and structure—what M. H. Abrams terms the art-as-such position (135)—still retains its power today as an effort to focus solely upon the art work itself. Clearly these almost contrary impulses of the aesthetic, its ostensibly paradoxical efforts toward disinterest and community (Levine 25), suggest that aesthetic analysis has always looked both outside of the work of art, to the domain of the audience, and within the work of art, to its formal constituents. To return to Ellison’s formulation, aesthetic analysis is both public and private, external and internal.

Toni Morrison’s writing emerges from a complex array of aesthetic and cultural traditions, yet the overwhelming tendency in Morrison scholarship—a tendency fostered by Morrison herself—has been to ignore or even to deny diverse influences. The great anxiety in Morrison scholarship, and unquestionably in Morrison’s own critical writings, is the question of originality, of indebtedness. As Morrison herself has famously stated, "I am not like James Joyce; I am not like Thomas Hardy; I am not like Faulkner.… my effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed in music (McKay, An Interview 152). Morrison laments the effort of critics to place [her work] into an already established literary tradition. I find such criticism dishonest, she asserts, because it never goes into the work on its own terms. It comes from some other place and finds content outside of the work and wholly irrelevant to it (Tate 161). Morrison desires an aesthetic analysis, but one that will reveal only her immersion in what she terms Black style, a style that she asserts will faithfully… reflect the aesthetic tradition of Afro-American culture (Wilson 136, Morrison, Memory" 388–89).

The scholarship detailing Morrison’s position within a specifically African-American aesthetic and cultural tradition is vast and impressive,² and certainly an understanding of Morrison’s work requires immersion in ways of knowing, to borrow Nellie McKay’s phrase (Introduction 3), that are not necessarily a part of the western tradition: African and African-American myth and language, African-American musical traditions of the spirituals, blues, and jazz, alternative approaches to history, religion, and ancestry, culture-specific concepts and philosophical ideas of time and cosmology that are often opposed to traditional western concepts, and many more. However, this emphasis in Morrison scholarship is blind to Morrison’s positions within a more diverse aesthetic tradition. In her introduction to the Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, McKay states that Morrison’s novels are a rejection of white patriarchal modernism, yet two paragraphs later McKay adds, as if in an afterthought, that as a teenager, Morrison read the European literary masters—English, Russian, and French (Introduction 2–3). There is no attempt to reconcile these apparently contrary positions, nor any attempt to account for Morrison’s master’s thesis on Faulkner and Woolf, high modernists to be sure, nor her formal training in Classics at Howard University.³ It is as if, in their zeal to bring into relief the specifically African-American elements of Morrison’s writing, critics have turned a blind eye to the clear presence of other elements in that writing. Yet this is precisely to deny some of the most astonishing and enlightening features of Morrison’s work; and it results in only a partial view of her literary achievement.

Indeed, Morrison herself has suggested that any critical view that would blind itself to her training in a western, even classical background is misguided. She has stated that her awareness of the consciousness of being black did not begin for her until she left Cornell and began teaching in the late 1950s, when she was nearly thirty: I came to [the value of being black] as a clear statement very late in life, I think, because I left home… and went to school, and the things I studied were Western and, you know, I was terrifically fascinated with all of that, and at that time any information that came to me from my own people seemed to me to be backwoodsy and uninformed. You know, they hadn’t read all these wonderful books (Jones and Vinson 173–74). In the meantime she had studied Latin for four years, taken degrees in classics and literature, and written a Master’s Thesis that employed structures of Greek Tragedy to understand the work of Faulkner and Woolf. Consequently, it seems indisputable that her engagement with a western, classical tradition preceded her engagement with a literary African-American tradition.⁴ The classical tradition has influenced the writing of all her major novels, as suggested by her comments that the Greek chorus… reminds me of what goes on in Black churches and in jazz, and that the denoument of many of her novels is Greek in its sense of suffering and realization (Jones and Vinson 176–77). And though Morrison has cautioned against the use of western aesthetic ideas in the analysis of African-American literature, nevertheless she has also stated that finding or imposing Western influences in/on Afro-American literature ha[s] value provided the valued process does not become self-anointing (Unspeakable Things 9–10, 19).

Thus, the tendency in Morrison scholarship to focus exclusively on the political, cultural, and racial elements in her writing means that an essential aspect of her work has been largely undocumented and unheard. The essays in this volume seek to fill this gap and, to employ a favorite metaphor of Morrison, to remove certain cataracts that have clouded the vision of Morrison scholarship and to demonstrate how successfully traditional aesthetic concepts can engage her writing and its implications. But at the same time to take up something like the western aesthetic tradition, and to apply that tradition to the work of a writer who is certainly engaged in putting much of western thought and culture into question, is at best a deeply problematic and contentious project. Morrison certainly does inherit this tradition, but this inheritance—like the legacies parents leave their children throughout her fiction—is a tortured and troubling affair. As the following essays all seek to demonstrate, Morrison’s writings talk back to this aesthetic tradition in a number of ways—critical, cautious, satiric, approving. Thus, these essays show not just how Morrison’s work is opened up through aesthetic analysis, but also what this effort teaches us about those very aesthetic theories themselves.

This approach is relevant not just to Morrison’s own writing but to the entire tradition of African-American literature, which has, since its very inception, been powerfully concerned with the tensions between the artistic and the political, a tension that generally reduces itself to a conflict between politics and aesthetics. This conflict is present at the very heart of African-American writing throughout this century, and the African-American novel in particular, at least as early as the Harlem Renaissance, has been explicitly anxious about its position between the political and aesthetic realms. Consequently Morrison’s writing, and Morrison scholarship, is positioned at the end of a long discourse on the relations between art and politics in African-American literature that is still very prevalent today.

The problem was posed most famously by W. E. B. Du Bois, who asked in his 1926 essay The Criteria of Negro Art, what have we who are slaves and black to do with Art? For Du Bois, the aesthetic realm has value only if it furthers a political cause: The apostle of beauty, he insists, "becomes the apostle of Truth and Right not by choice but by inner and outer compulsion. Free he is but his freedom is ever bounded by Truth and Justice; and slavery only dogs him when he is denied the right to tell the Truth or recognize an ideal of Justice. Thus, he famously concludes, all Art is propaganda and ever must be—I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda (999, emphasis added). Du Bois’s position is certainly defendable, committed as he was to social betterment for a bitterly oppressed people; yet his link between beauty and compulsion, and his insistence that African-American art must be propaganda, is surely troubling. This same tension between constraint and liberty is stated in Langston Hughes’s landmark essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, published the same year as Du Bois’s essay. Hughes argues that there is no such thing as an African-American poet who is simply a poet, independent of race—such a poet is really a white poet. Hughes asserts that the effort to be anything other than a certain kind of black in one’s poetry is the cause for shame: So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, ‘I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet’" (692–94). Thus, like Du Bois, Hughes offers condemnation to any artist who seeks an aesthetic independent of Hughes’s idea of racial authenticity.

This sort of program of constraint and conformity shapes the political-aesthetic debate in African-American writing in the decades to follow, most prominently in Richard Wright’s influential Blueprint for Negro Writing of 1937. The essay’s very title suggests that the African-American novel ought to follow a certain fixed form, which for Wright consists of a narrow Marxist-naturalist design that would create a unified sense of a common life and a common fate which, when properly understood by an African-American writer, should unify his personality, organize his emotions, buttress him with a tense and obdurate will to change the world (59–60). As with Du Bois and Hughes, Wright’s goal is to bring about positive social change; yet the terms he employs in this essay—molding the consciousness, unifying, organizing, making common—all suggest the troubling emphasis on unity, conformity, and constraint evident in Du Bois and Hughes. And as with those earlier writers, to be opposed to this blueprint is to be an outcast.

Such was precisely the position of Zora Neale Hurston. No writer in the African-American tradition is more committed to the freedom of the artist than Hurston. In her lively essay of 1928, How It Feels to Be Colored Me, Hurston takes up the challenge of being simultaneously black and a writer in a way that explicitly rebukes the constraint put forth by Hughes just two years before. I am not tragically colored, she asserts. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.… I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it (215–16). Hurston insists that race is neither a constraint nor a burden to the artist—a bold aesthetic statement, given the climate of conformity that surrounded her. She lived and wrote in this fashion, and she paid the price.

Hurston’s famous split with Hughes over the composition of Mule Bone in 1930–1931 may have been a symptom of the aesthetic and political differences between them; Hurston called it the great cross of her life, and her sense of betrayal certainly began taking shape at this time.⁵ Soon after her split with Hughes, the most scathing denunciation of Hurston’s writing came from Wright, who wrote of Their Eyes Were Watching God that the novel had no basic idea or theme that lends itself to significant interpretation.… The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought (Between Laughter). Wright’s review was echoed by Alain Locke, supposedly one of Hurston’s closest friends during the Harlem Renaissance, who similarly complained that Hurston needed to come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction (Hemenway 241). The complaint leveled against Hurston was a political one—that she is insufficiently engaged in the social-political struggles of her day—masked in aesthetic terms.⁶ After her condemnation for the alleged immoral act in 1948, Hurston blamed her own people for her fall. Despite an utter lack of evidence, the African-American press published several sensational, condemning articles, prompting Hurston’s now-famous lament: My race has seen fit to destroy me without reason, and with the vilest tools conceived of by man so far.… All that I have ever tried to do has proved useless. All that I have believed in has failed me.… I feel hurled down a filthy privy hole (Hemenway 321–22). The connection between her independent views on art and politics and her condemnation are provocative, particularly in the light of Hughes’s private glee over her fall.⁷ Hurston’s life reflects the pariah status foisted upon the African-American artist who refused to conform her work or her life to any blueprint, and her fate explains her statement that race consciousness is a deadly explosive on the tongues of men (quoted in Gates, Writing ‘Race’ 5).

In this respect—and in many others—Ellison is the heir to Hurston. His most pronounced and forceful aesthetic statements, made in the early 1960s well after the astonishing success of Invisible Man, came in response to Wright’s theories; here Ellison made his crucial distinction that novels, while always public gestures, are not necessarily political ones. Rather than being a tool for mere social protest—to Ellison the most elementary form of writing—Ellison sees the novel as a creative form that is as rich as its possibilities are allowed to be: Wright believed in the much abused idea that novels are ‘weapons’—the counterpart of the dreary notion, common among most minority groups, that novels are instruments of good public relations. But I believe that true novels, even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core. Thus they would preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject. Ellison concludes by stating—in a formula that reads like a reply to Du Bois’s famous dictum about art and propaganda—that "the inadequacy characteristic of most novels by Negroes [is] simple failure of craft … the desire to have protest perform the difficult tasks of art" (114, 137, emphasis added). For Ellison, the novel, while being inescapably and necessarily political, is principally a matter of aesthetics. Any other position would limit and constrict that art.

Despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews of Invisible Man, the African-American left criticized the novel’s failure to address the social ills of African-Americans (Busby 117). These negative views were repeated in Irving Howe’s well-known critique of Ellison for being insufficiently protest-oriented, and for the sudden, unprepared and implausible assertion of unconditioned freedom in Invisible Man (Howe 115). But the most telling critiques of Ellison emerged in the 1960s, when Ellison grew increasingly opposed—particularly on the crucial question of the relations between art and politics—to the Black Power and Black Aesthetic movements that dominated African-American intellectual and cultural life. Ellison’s avowedly integrative approach to art clashed with the increasingly separatist position of many African-American intellectuals in that decade, and the intolerance of the Black Aesthetic enhanced Ellison’s opposition to the ideal of a separate and independent Black Art. As a consequence, at Oberlin in 1969 Ellison was nearly booed off the stage by black students, one of whom shouted that he was an Uncle Tom (O’Meally, Ralph Ellison 247; see also Walling). Ellison’s famous literary silencing may well have been related to the atmosphere of intolerance and constraint that surrounded his life after Invisible Man.

The Black Aesthetic movement is the third stage, after the Harlem Renaissance and the debates of mid-century, in this formidable theorizing about the relationship between art and politics in African-American writing. The Black Aesthetic subsumes aesthetics beneath politics (Gayle, Introduction xvii-xviii, xxi; Fuller 3), and adheres to the blueprint of constraint, for its three great predecessors were precisely Du Bois, Hughes, and Wright, and its great opponent within African-American culture was Ellison.⁸ Addison Gayle’s conclusion to his landmark anthology The Black Aesthetic uses Hughes’s arguments to dismiss the work of prominent African-American writers whom he sees as literary assimilationists, among whom he includes James Weldon Johnson, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison (The Function of Literature 407, 411). Such exclusion of three of the most prominent African-American writers prompts Houston Baker’s awareness of the shortcomings of the Black Aesthetic—its tendencies toward chauvinism, cultural xenophobia, and its lack of a distinctive theoretical vocabulary (Generational Shifts 296, 301)—and explains his claim that the Black Aesthetic, however understandable and even inevitable, was probably not the most fruitful approach to the black literary text (The Journey Back xii).

And yet, to dismiss the efforts of the Black Aesthetic movement out of hand is a suspect and facile gesture, and quite contrary to the impulses of the present volume. For despite its apparent rejection of traditional aesthetic concepts, the Black Aesthetic movement offers a thoughtful and critical engagement with traditional aesthetics that reveals much about both aesthetics and the African-American novel. The Black Arts Movement, asserts Larry Neal, proposes a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic, particularly its absolute exclusion of all aspects relevant to African-American life, and its desire to conceal its own political ideology beneath the innocent facade of art (273). As Gayle argues, the western aesthetic has always implicitly devalued the concerns of cultural others, and has written into its critical positions certain political values and judgements: "The white aesthetic, despite the academic critics, has always been with us.… the poets of biblical times were discussing beauty in terms of light and dark—the essential characteristics of a white and black aesthetic—and